Tag Archives: Barra de Navidad

This is our first season without a sailboat. We have booked an apartment in Melaque for 2 months starting November 15th. But we flew south on November 13th on Westjet.
The Calgary airport has just opened a new international terminal. It has big, wide open spaces but not enough washrooms nor chairs. The worst thing about the terminal is that there is no Tim Horton’s there! But there was a nice sculpture of a “Family of Bears” done by Stewart Steinhauer of Creston BC.

We stayed at the Hotel Barra de Navidad right across from our favourite restaurant: Ramons. The hotel’s restaurant, Bananas, was a perfect place for breakfast. We had been there previously for dinner but had not been too impressed. It just does breakfast now and it was great. There is a nice greeter at the entrance to the restaurant.

We had some rain the first 2 days and were concerned that the clouds would make it difficult to see the super moon on Monday night. We went to El Manglitos on the lagoon to see if we could see the moon rise. We were entertained by a local fisherman pulling his panga behind him as he swam to shore.

We didn’t see the moon come up so walked back to the square to see if the clouds had cleared. The moon was barely visible but we were encouraged to join the local women in their excercise class.

We were able to see the Super Moon as it was almost setting from our hotel room the morning. It didn’t look that much bigger than normal to us!

We are back at the marina in Barra de Navidad, Waiting On Steve. We are waiting for a go/no-go for us to join our friend Steve on his catamaran, sailing from Panama to Tahiti. If it is a go we will mothball Snowaway here in Barra; if no-go we will sail north when the next weather window opens up…

Meanwhile we are enjoying our morning walks, visits from the French Baker, pool time, meals and music in Barra.

We have been in Barra de Navidad for 2 weeks now and have been enjoying our time here. There has been some damage to the area as a result of Hurricane Patricia. The palapa roofs were all lost, many tiles on roofs were blown off and many trees lost branches. We are at Marina Puerto de la Navidad which is part of the Grand Isla Navidad Resort. The hotel did lose some trees and tiles and we were fascinated to watch the Mexicans replace the tile roof of a small building near the marina. This video shows them tossing the tiles to the roof. It was 30 C out there and they made it look easy!

We have been doing our daily walks. Richard dreams about these walks during our summers in Calgary and we can’t wait to see our favourite birds. The chachalacas are very noisy; it is almost like they are warning their fellow birds that someone is coming. We see them in trees and in the towns. The Mexicans feed them lettuce to encourage them to visit.

On days that we expect to do other activities like kayaking we usually do a short walk down to the golf course along the lagoon side. On those days when we don’t have anything planned we will walk over the hill to the Pacific Ocean. There are not as many birds this year, we guess that is due to Hurricane Patricia. But we have still seen many types like the Vermillion flycatchers, trogons, streak-backed orioles.

And we do see lots of squirrels working at getting into coconuts. We notice the sound, almost like a little saw cutting away the fibers.

There also seems to be quite a few large iguanas this year. This one was in a tree near the lagoon in the golf course!

We are in Barra de Navidad for Christmas once again! It is one of our most favourite places and we had hurried down from Mazatlan to make sure we were here in time.

We started our day, like all the others, with a walk. I wanted to see the point where there is a Madonna and cross. This was the first significant site of the damage caused by Hurricane Patricia. The cross was gone and the walkway was destroyed. I am sure it will be repaired soon but it brought home what damage can be caused by nature.
In the afternoon we had the Christmas cruisers potluck dinner at the Time Out Bar. There were about 60 cruisers there to enjoy turkey and ham prepared by Johnco and all the fixings supplied by the cruisers. We were happy to sit with Deb and Joe from Pacific Jade for our wonderful meal. Richard and Cheryl, Lazy Days, made a great couple with their leafy shirts.A white elephant gift exchange was had and lots of stealing happened. Robert of Harmony’s new hat was quickly picked up but Deb was lucky to keep her new fly swatter!

We finally were able to leave the marina in Barra on March 11. We only planned on sailing to Tenacatita about 15 NM away but we got out of the marina by 8:15 and the winds were lighter than we expected. So we motored 40 NM to Bahia Chamela where we are currently anchored off the small village of Pérula. We were entertained by turtles and dolphins along the way.

We expect to leave Chamela at first light on Friday. Our current plan to do a straight shot to Mazatlán, about 250 NM away. At 5 knots this will take us about 50 hours non-stop, as long as the winds stay as forecast.